Top insights for IT pros
From cybersecurity and big data to cloud computing, IT Brew covers the latest trends shaping business tech in our 4x weekly newsletter, virtual events with industry experts, and digital guides.
“Going green” isn’t just a catchphrase for the marketing team: IT and tech teams are also hoping to create more sustainable environments now and in the future. This comes as the global market for green tech and sustainability is forecast to jump from this year’s 28.6 billion to 134.9 billion by 2030, a February report shows. IT Brew caught up with tech and sustainability experts to explore what going green looks like in the industry.
Why is it so important that IT teams and tech teams consider going green?
“There’s an interesting sort of inflection point there of, how much is this going to influence buying decisions?” Kyle Campos, chief technology and product officer at CloudBolt—a software company that wants to “simplify cloud waste remediation” on a large scale—told IT Brew. “Is it informational, so that you have the context of, ‘Hey, our decisions result in X amount of carbon [emissions],’ or whatever it may be? Or are you actually evaluating your efficiency to make different buying decisions?”
Let’s say I’m in the IT industry, but I have no idea what my impact as an IT professional is when thinking about emissions, storage centers, and how data is transferred. Can you walk me through that?
“Well, I think there’s several different ways that you can look at it,” said Sophie Graham, chief sustainability officer at Swedish enterprise software company IFS. “And I guess one is…if you’re in the software space, then it’s, how is that software designed, and how could it be designed to maximize energy efficiency? Even if you’re not directly in the software space, those are the kinds of conversations you can start to have.”
Graham said companies may also consider the data centers they’re using and what’s powering them. “Beyond just the energy use rates, water is a really big one when it comes to data centers,” she said.
How can we think about cloud waste, when cloud-based servers are considered an improvement compared to regular data centers?
“So, at the end of the day, when we talk about cloud, it’s not because they don’t exist, it just means they don’t exist on your property,” Campos said. “And you’re consuming a piece of it. The waste becomes an aggregation of everyone’s behavior…if you’re talking about AWS, or Google, or whatever.”
What are your predictions for green tech, especially in relation to what you do?
“It’s definitely [improved], I think, on a couple of things,” said Ian van Reenen, chief technology officer at 1E, which provides an automated platform that helps IT teams improve end-user experience and evolve IT operations. “The hardware manufacturers have become a lot more efficient in terms of the way they designed devices, and one of the things you can see [is] in terms of battery life, how much longer batteries tend to last.”